McMahon’s Reality Check

There was a lot of buzz about Eliot Spitzer’s plan, announced during yesterday’s State of the State speech to appoint Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi to a new commission that will look at the possibility of imposing property tax caps for local schools and municipalities.

As a result, some are already calling it the Suozzi Commission, but along with that, notes E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for Policy Research, entails some risk.

McMahon was on Talk 1300 radio this morning and then he later chatted with some reporters here at the Capitol and he noted that any real change in property taxes will mean changes inÂ the gold-plated pension and retirement health benefits that teachers and municipal employees get in New York.

WithÂ those benefitsÂ protected or even memorialized in state law, that means legislators will have to go up against powerful and well funded unions such as the state teachers union,Â Â CSEA and the 1199 health care unions.

That amounts to a political third rail, McMahon noted, which in turn raises the possibility, at least, that the tax cap study might not yield much in the way of results, which could in turn mean that Suozzi could ultimately become the governor’s “fall guy” for aÂ Â failed effort.

Of course it’s too early to doom the cap commission, which McMahon is rooting for, but the guarded assessment provides an interesting take on just how politically difficult it will be to actually get a handle on NY’s highest-in-the-nation property taxes.Â Â